Blog

About a week ago I heard an interesting NPR article on stem cell news. They were discussing some recent discoveries/observations regarding what had previously been considered a scientific scandal. If you recall, a few years ago (in 2004) South Korean scientists claimed to have cloned a human embryo, and derived stem cells from the clone. That particular claim quickly turned out to have been faked, and they people responsible resigned in disgrace, but now scientists from Harvard working with cells obtained from the Koreans are now suggesting that they (the Koreans) were the first to produce embryonic stem cells using only egg cells. That process is called parthenogenesis, and it’s been possible for simpler animals (including vertebrates like frogs) for a long time. The Harvard guys had problems getting heard, because nobody wanted to consider anything to do with the South Korean data.

I think all of this is ironic in so many ways. First that the South Koreans did something historic, and may not have realized it because they were too busy faking data. Second that it was scientifically unfashionable to mention anything to do with them. Thirdly, and from my point of view most importantly is that this is one more step in the direction of making fundamentalist’s position even less logically tenable. The moral argument is that stem cell research harms embryo’s. That position got pretty weak earlier when it became possible to remove a cell from a blastocyst without harming it and form cloned stem cells, but the fundies recovered by asking “How can you be sure the embryo won’t be harmed in any way?”. If a human ovum can develop into an embryo without conception, how will the fundamentalists manage to define the beginning of life in such a way as to prevent research? When will the “soul” tiptoe into the petri dish? How will the lunatics know to attack living people to save the unborn? It’s almost, but not quite as good as being able to derive embryonic stem cells from adult stem cells.

As an aside, I see at least one site using human parthenogenesis as the explanation for the “virgin birth” of Jesus. This makes me chuckle, but I’ll have to think through why.

In a graphic from yesterday the New York Times magazine discusses America’s view of what happens after death. According to a 2002 pool, ten percent of us believe “we return to earth in different form”, twenty four percent believe “the soul lives in a different place, determined by past actions”, forty eight percent believe “we go to heaven or hell, depending on confession of sins” and “accepting Jesus” and ten percent believe “there is no life.” (Hmm. That adds up to only ninety two percent. I’d like to hear what got lumped into the miscellaneous category. Are there many mothership believers?) Of the other responses I’m thinking that the twenty four percent and the forty eight percent should be added together as weaker and stronger versions of “heaven and hell” believers. So that’s seventy two percent roughly in accordance with Christianity.

What’s interesting to me is how this matches other results. In the “Religion in the United States” wikipedia entry it says:

80% of the U.S. is Christian and 15% do not adhere to a religion. Other religions comprise 5% of the U.S. population. According to the CIA World Factbook, the U.S. is 78% Christian and 10% no religion, while other religions comprise 12% of the U.S. population. In descending order, the largest identified religious groups are Protestant (52%); Roman Catholic (24%); Mormon (2%); Buddhist (2%); Jewish (1%); and Muslim (1%).^[2]

So there’s both gross agreement with the 2002 poll and interesting disagreement. Ten percent of people identify with no religion, and ten percent don’t believe in an afterlife. That’s seems consistent. Now let’s add up Protestants, Catholics , Muslim and Jewish believers. We get seventy eight percent. Yet only seventy two percent of the 2002 poll respondents accept even the proposition of a heaven or hell afterlife. That’s almost twenty million people who don’t accept a pretty basic dogma from their professed canon. There’s clearly confusion among believers about what they believe.

I’d like to better understand these numbers and their implications. Do these differences help identify hidden non-believers? Confused people? Polling errors? Of those who believe in afterlife (apparently about 80%) what does that mean? What do people really believe about an afterlife, and why do they believe it? What mechanisms do they attribute to the continuity of identity. Is it entirely magic? Is there some personality substrate that’s not visible to science? Is it just not thought about? Interestingly, today’s New York Times magazine has an article on the possibility of atheists beliveing in an afterlife. The article is “Eternity for Atheists” and frankly I find it completely uncompelling.

Finally, it’s clear that atheists are a significant segment of society. More than Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Mormon believers added together. Make of that what you will.